How To STOP Losing Muscle As You Age (IMPORTANT!)

As you age, it is natural to start to lose muscle mass. But did you know, the rate of loss of muscle and strength beyond the age of even 30 starts to occur much faster than you would have thought. The good news is, there is something you can do about it to slow, if not completely stop, the mechanism

Take one look at this graph and you might not be very optimistic because you’ll see here that with each passing decade we lose both muscle mass and strength. As a matter of fact, even in our 30s, we’re losing 3 and a half to 4% of both. And that increases to 6 and 12 to 9 12% of muscle loss and strength respectively when we get into just our 50s. And guys, it gets even worse when we go beyond that. So, what are you supposed to do?

Throw in the towel or is there something you could actually do? Well, today I want to identify for you the eight specific things that are contributing to this graph. And the good news is there’s something that you can do about every one of them. This is due to something called anabolic resistance. As we get older, there’s a simple age related decline in your body’s ability to respond positively to even resistance training and protein intake.

Even when you’re doing the right things, your body cannot respond as powerfully to the same stimulus that used to build muscle. Things change. I used to be able to read print on the side of a medicine bottle like nothing. And now all of a sudden I turn 50 and it’s very difficult for me to read that. And that’s just something happening to my body.

Nothing else has changed in terms of how I approach every day. Just things change in your body. And there’s not a blue pill to fix everything that goes wrong. Right? So the first trigger that’s actually responsible for what you’re seeing is this dose response curve when it comes to protein intake.

So, when you’re younger, to stimulate something called muscle protein synthesis, which is the building of new muscle, you might only need 20 to 25 grams of protein per meal. When you’re older, that limit is now raised to about 35 to 40 grams. It’s actually due specifically to something I’m going to cover here in a second. Now, we’re talking per meal here. The most important factor is how much you’re taking in in a day.

And I always go with the recommendation of one gram per pound of body weight and sometimes upwards of 1. 2 grams if you’re training really hard. Especially as you get older, those numbers are going to become, as you see here, a bigger and bigger requirement. But even at the permeal level, it starts to matter more as you get older because of this blunting of this response to the protein intake to create new muscle growth. But what I want you to visualize is the the volume dial on an old radio.

There’s some radios that when you just turn the volume up just a little little bit, you get a real big increase in the sound. And then there’s some radios where you have to turn it a lot to get that same increase. Both of them are increasing volume, but only one of them is doing them very effectively. Think about the older muscle as that volume control that has to be turned a lot to get the same effect. What you can do about this is to actually start to care a little bit more about how much protein you’re having at every meal.

Again, number one concern, meeting your daily protein requirement, making sure that you’re getting that one gram per pound of body weight. If you are, then trying to divide that up so that you’re getting or crossing that threshold a little bit more regularly throughout the day to maximize the number of bouts of muscle protein synthesis that you are going to have each day. Again, realizing that this is going to become more difficult as you get older. The second thing is there’s a blunting of something called the mTor pathway. And the mtor pathway is actually one of the most significant means by which we build new muscle.

And the most effective way to stimulate that pathway is through one specific amino acid, leucine. And in most high quality proteins like whey protein, yogurt, eggs, fish, the percentage of leucine in that protein is around 10%. So if you had 30 grams of protein from let’s say fish, then three grams of that 10% is going to be in the form of leucine. Leucine is the direct trigger for the mTor pathway that is going to help you to build new muscle. And again, in younger individuals, two to three grams seems to be the amount of leucine that’s needed to cross that leucine threshold to create new muscle growth.

In older individuals, 40s, 50s, and beyond, that number increases. The sensitivity to leucine goes down. That mTor pathway is blunted. So, what used to be like an onoff switch is now a dimmer switch. Okay?

And you have to turn that dimmer up. And the way to do that is to have more leucine in your diet and to focus on that. So what can you do? You can either increase the amount of total protein that you take in realizing that 10% of that when coming from high quality sources is going to come in the form of leucine or you can actually supplement your regular protein intake with some additional leucine. You can take branch chain amino acids and I know they’ve gotten some and flack over the years but as an adjunct to the regular protein intake.

Remember, you’d have to take 90% more if you were taking it in the form of protein. So, if you wanted to get, let’s say, four grams of leucine, you could have 20 grams of protein in the meal you’re eating, and then two additional grams of leucine strictly from the branch amino acids. But just realize that the BCAAs, in addition to promoting recovery, which we’re going to talk about here, are going to allow for more muscle protein synthesis by helping you to cross that lucine threshold more readily. again amplifying what you’re already taking in in the in the form of protein. The third thing that we have here is the effect of training on muscle protein synthesis.

So, here’s where it gets interesting because the number one stimulus for building muscle as you get older is still training, right? You’ve seen people who do all the right things in terms of eating enough protein, but when they don’t stimulate the muscle, in terms of working out and working out, as you’re going to see here in a minute, at a high enough or hard enough level, then they don’t build new muscle. The number one way to build muscle is going to be by having an effective training plan and doing it consistently. However, what’s interesting here is that the intensity of the repetitions has to go up the older you get because the lower the weight that you use, the farther away from failure that you go, the lower the intensity level of what you’re training at, the much more difficult it becomes to be add actual muscle from what you’re doing. And I see people do this all the time.

They go in the wrong direction. They figure as they get older, they need to step off the gas, lighten things up and kind of go through the motions just to make sure that they’re getting their training in. But that’s not training. That to me is just exercising. You’re moving your body around trying to make sure that you’re staying active, but staying active is not actively building muscle.

The way to actively build muscle is to challenge yourself. And again, as you get older, we saw the age related decline. Father time is undefeated. we’re going to continually lose muscle mass, but you can do a really good job of decreasing that amount by holding on to as much muscle as you can by almost gaining by maintaining, if that makes sense. The way you want to do this is to train with more intensity.

Make sure that you’re taking your sets to as close to failure, if not all the way to failure, depending on the exercise. Not on squats. Train with heavier weights, but train slowly. If you control the weight, you will not have to worry as much about increased injury risk by doing so. An